1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tool guides and more particularly pertains to a new adjustable position tool guide for performing operations with tools on a work piece at an accurate distance and orientation with respect to edges or other features of the work piece in a highly convenient manner.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Devices have been proposed and produced that are designed to guide the movement of tools with respect to a work piece in a particular orientation to the geometry of the work piece. These guides are often used to guide the movement of a saw, such as a power saw, across a work piece to cut the work piece to a desired length.
While the use of such guides can be useful, especially when a large number of work pieces need to be cut to various lengths, the guides are most useful if a lateral side of the shoe of the power saw can be slid along a portion of the guide that is oriented substantially parallel to the desired direction of movement of the saw. However, the typical configuration of portable circular power saws is irregular in the sense that the housing extends for a significant distance from one side of the saw beyond one lateral edge of the shoe, while the housing does not extend beyond the other lateral edge of the shoe. Typically, the protruding housing interferes with the movement of one of the lateral sides of the shoe along the known guides, especially those guides that employ conventional measuring tape devices that tend to extend upwardly from the surface of the work piece, and interfere with the movement of the protruding housing. As a result, only the lateral side over which the housing of the saw does not extend is able to slide along the guides. This can be problematic as this requires the user of the saw to either only use one hand to hold the saw (regardless of whether the user is right-handed or left-handed) or position himself or herself on only one side of the work piece (but not the other). This has significantly limited the usefulness of such guide devices.
Another difficulty that limits the known guide devices is the ability to accurately measure the distance between the end of the work piece and the operative edge of the guide, or more usefully, the saw blade of the saw as the saw is moved along the operative edge of the guide device. Since a tape measure used in conjunction with these devices cannot extend all the way to the saw blade without hampering movement of the saw, the distance measurement indicated on the tape is not the actual distance from the end of the work piece. Some type of adjustment needs to be made to the reading of the tape measure at some point, such as adding a known compensating distance to the distance indicated on the tape to compensate for the distance between the saw blade and the measurement indicated on the tape. This requires repeated calculations at each measurement, and introduces the possibility of measurement errors when numerous measurements are made, even when the adjustment to the measurement is deemed to be simple.
In these respects, the adjustable position tool guide according to the present invention substantially departs from the conventional concepts and designs of the prior art, and in so doing provides an apparatus primarily developed for the purpose of performing operations with tools on a work piece at an accurate distance and orientation with respect to edges or other features of the work piece in a highly convenient manner.